Interpol

With Our Love to Admire, Interpol have tackled the problem of what to do on a major label debut by incorporating a little extra studio trickery into their tried-and-true formula. Three albums into their career, the biggest change in their aesthetic is non-musical. They present themselves to the public now with less of their old monochromatic NYC mystique and a little more focus on their individual personalities, not the least of which has to do with the rise to prominence of bassist Carlos D and his many hobbies: classical composition, film work, tending to his Italian Greyhound Gaius, and growing one hell of a moustache.

Before the release of the new album, we spoke to frontman Paul Banks about how the band has evolved, why they ditched their old color scheme, how their very capable rhythm section affects the songwriting and recording processes, and Banks' first musical love: "hip-hop."

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to ditch the red-and-black color scheme you had on the Turn on the Bright Lights and Antics covers for the Our Love to Admire art?

Paul Banks: Think about it. If we had just kept with it, wouldn't that be kind of lame? We never really looked at that as a branding thing, the red and black. For the time it certainly was, but as far as from here on out [goes] we never said that it was going to be the visual aesthetic for our design. It was very appropriate for everything in the beginning as we introduced our music to the public. The minimalism of the design on both those records served a purpose for us as far as how people first met the music in the visual realm. Now I think we have a lot of leeway and freedom to do whatever we feel like creatively because our identity has been established. People understand who we are and what we do, and in our minds we were never limited to a particular sound or a particular design scheme. I really loved how minimal Antics was, and the color scheme worked great because those colors work with us and our sound and our visual and everything. But this time around I was very eager to approach it in terms of pure design; I'm sort of a design buff. And nobody in the band made a peep when we started talking about going in a vastly different direction. We don't have any reason to maintain some sort of visual thread. Now, into the third record, we can do whatever the fuck we want.

Pitchfork: Have you seen the cover of the Ola Podrida record that features the same exhibit in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as the one in the Our Love to Admire art?

PB: Yeah, I heard about that; you guys had a big story up about it.

Pitchfork: Had you seen that before then?

PB: No, of course not. I wonder whether or not we left an image lying around and somebody stole our shit, but apparently it's from a slightly different angle than our photo is, so who knows? It could be pure coincidence, or they stole our shit and just wanted to do another photo. I don't know. The idea of some other band coming in and finding one of our images and then, instead of stealing it, going in and re-shooting it-- it sounds to me like it's totally a coincidence. And I don't really give a fuck.

Pitchfork: Now that you're on your third record, do you guys still feel any pressure at this point? Was there an imagined trajectory for the band at all? Are you where you thought you'd be?

PB: I think we did have some long-term discussion very early on as far as an ideal career path. I remember Daniel [Kessler] once broke down the ideal path, which is somewhat what we've ended up following, but as far as ambition and expectation, I hoped for some success when we first started, but once the first record came out you had to just say, "Well, who the fuck knows where this is gonna go?" And then it just happened to go extremely well over the course of those first two albums. But if we had been angling for some sort of massive fame we would've written different music.

We weren't angling for anything other than making the sort of music that we wanted to make, and you can never bank on our style of music being successful at the time we were doing it. So it was never a ploy to get recognition or fame or anything; it was just music, and it just happened to work out really really well. For the third album, I'm fortunately now in a place where I put so much of myself into the album and worked really hard on this album, and that earned me, for the first time, a certain sort of peace about it. I'm kind of zen about what happens afterward because I'm 100% proud of this record. And in an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.

Once we made the record, I felt very much like, "Fuck it, whatever. If people like it, they like it; if they don't like it, they don't like it, but I know that this is a great album." And that was the kind of certainty that I think comes with age and experience, but I've never felt quite so relaxed about the outcome in the past. The second album, it was very important that we made a strong impression because I think a lot of bands have a strong first and then their second showing is not quite so strong and people really point that out. So I was aware that there was quite a bit of pressure for our second album to be good and for it to make as big of a punch as our first did, and I think we accomplished that.

When it came to this record, it felt much more like, "All right, now people understand this is who Interpol is, this is what we do," and now it's back to that insular environment, purely insular, how we write music. That's how it was composing the record and recording the album, and so far the reviews look pretty fucking good, so I have to say that's nice, but I wasn't really concerned with how it's received or how it succeeds because I just feel beyond expectation, because I'm just very proud.

Pitchfork: When you say that people know what Interpol are about, what is that exactly?

PB: I think that we have a sound. I think that you can always hear when it's Interpol, and I think that's because of the personalities in the band. We all have musical identities, and you should be able to tell it's us because there shouldn't be anyone else that sounds like us because it's these individuals expressing themselves that make up our sound. It's not a contrived sound or a designed sound; it's just based around pure inspiration off of the four of us working around each other. So I think that sonically, yeah, you should be able to tell when it's Interpol. Pitchfork: It seems those songs have shifted a little bit from record to record. Bright Lights struck me as more of a drummer's record than Antics was, but there is this kind of bubbling over in the rhythm section in a lot of your songs. Going into writing or recording a song, how do you ensure that rhythmic aspects are foregrounded?

PB: Well, there are different reasons for what you're saying. Sam [Fogarino] is the shit, and I started listening to some of Antics to work out a beat-- I was listening to "Length of Love", and I noticed that you can't cover that beat. It sounds really easy, but it's really fucking hard because he's doing some crazy shit on the hi-hat, so for an amateur, don't even give it a shot [laughs]. But I noticed that the beat wasn't in my face. I think I know what you're talking about with the production on Antics with the drums. So for me, personally, I was very game to "let's crank the shit out of Sam on this album" because of that kind of shit, and I love drummers. When I go to see a rock show it all rides on the drummer.

Pitchfork: The way Carlos [Dengler] carries the melodies to a lot of songs on his bass is another interesting twist on the traditional rhythm section.

PB: That's an interesting thing about what Carlos does; he's not a rhythm bass player. He's a massive compositional [force] with a bass. I think that's partially because he's not really a bass player. He's more like a guitarist who plays the bass.

Pitchfork: Was that his original instrument?

PB: Yeah. Well, he was out of music when Daniel recruited him to the band. He retired and Daniel brought him back and made him the bass player.

Pitchfork: [Laughs] How old was he when he retired?

PB: I don't know, like 22 probably. Yeah, I know, he was retired. [To Carlos] We're talking about your retirement before you joined.

Pitchfork: Was he doing any composing for film during this retirement?

PB: No, I don't think he was involved in music, period, at that point. He's a big classical fan, but no, I don't think he was doing music of any sort at the time when Daniel recruited him. Daniel kind of got a vibe off of him and thought, "This guy's probably a musician." And Carlos is one of those insanely gifted people; he just started to play bass to jam with Daniel, and he's pretty badass. And then all of that compositional stuff, I think he did study some theory, so he can compose, and I think that's what he's doing when he's going off into the film scoring world.

Pitchfork: I noticed that there's at least one magazine cover photo of you guys with his greyhound, Gaius. Does the dog travel with you guys on the road?

PB: Yeah, he does. We love that little shit.

Pitchfork: So he's as much a band dog as he is just Carlos'?

PB: I mean, I think he likes the breed in particular because they're exceptionally loyal. So, you know, there's but one Carlos in that dog's life, but the dog likes the band and the band loves him, so he's sort of our mascot.

PB: That was a [DJ] night I had called Deuce Deuce with my partner, DJ Womanmaker. It was a nickname some guy in a pool hall was calling me one night that became my DJ name.

Pitchfork: He called you "fancy pants"?

PB: Some guy, it turns out he was in a fucking musical. He was a professional musical theater guy, and he's calling me fancy pants while I was kicking his ass at pool. But yeah, I got a chuckle out of that. So yeah, I'm a big fan of the hip-hop.

Pitchfork: For how long?

PB: Since seventh grade, I think. Before rock. Pitchfork: What got you into it?

PB: Straight Outta Compton. I had that album memorized when I was like 11.

Pitchfork: Do you have a favorite N.W.A member?

PB: I was a big fan of MC Ren at the time. He didn't quite stay in the game like the other guys did. I mean, I liked Eazy-E, too. He had "8 Ball", but what was the song that Ren mostly rapped on? "If It Ain't Ruff". That's a great song.

Pitchfork: How did you go from being a big hip-hop fan to starting a band like Interpol?

PB: My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail. And Nirvana and grunge was when I decided what I wanted to do with my life.

Pitchfork: It was Nirvana that did it?

PB: Yeah, I was a big Nirvana fan.

Pitchfork: Was there a specific song of theirs that did it for you?

PB: Nevermind came out when I was in eighth or ninth grade, and I'll still stand by Nirvana. I think they're fucking amazing. It really spoke to me, all of it, and "Aneurysm" off of Incesticide is my all-time favorite.

Pitchfork: Why did you personally find being in a rock band more appealing that making hip-hop in some form?

PB: I think rock will always be more exciting live, because you have a live drummer. You just can't fuck with live drummers. That's the most exciting thing that can happen in terms of witnessing music. And hip-hop kind of lacks that in the live arena. I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana. My influences were these people that I held as sacred, kind of like, "Wow, this person's amazing at what they do." And if you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are. If you come up with a contrived concept like "I want to sound like that" then you're kind of wack. Or whatever, you'll burn out, you'll run out of ideas.

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career. You've got nothing to draw from. So the idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case. Nor is it the case a lot of times when people talk about a band's influences. Anybody that's in a band probably has millions of fucking influences and loves music so much that they're totally cross-genre and don't say, "I only listen to this." That's for non-musicians to say: "I only listen to this or that type of music." I think musicians love all music, or at least that's my case. Neil Young and Crazy Horse was a huge influence, folk music-- fucking Leonard Cohen-- those were all big influences. Jane's Addiction was a big influence. But at no point did I ever say, "I'll chemically fuse these sounds together and some kind of concept and develop a band sound as a result of that." Our band's sound is developed out of the four of us influencing each other.

Pitchfork: But are there any Interpol songs where you had a specific idea from another song, like "Sam, think this beat from this N.W.A song"? Have you ever gotten any musical ideas for Interpol from rap?

PB: No. Sam wouldn't go for that anyway. Luckily, he feels the hip-hop too, so there are moments where I think we get kind of raunchy and everything, like at the end of "Say Hello to the Angels". But Sam comes up with his own beats, and Sam comes up with beats that I think are amazing, and that's why Sam's our drummer. So no, no one could really pass that through the filter process. If someone said, "Let's take this from that song," I think everybody else in the band would be like, "Let's not do that." Pitchfork: How do you write lyrics? Because a lot of times your lyrics seem pretty opaque; they don't always logically scan, and I'm wondering how intentional that is.

PB: When they don't scan, there's often something playful about that or something maybe a little mischievous, but it's also a little bit of a challenge on purpose. And as far as the opaqueness: I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective. So nothing is really cut and dry in the first place, so it seems sort of disingenuous of me to act like things are very straightforward when I don't perceive them that way. I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate.

Pitchfork: Do you ever write lyrics and mean nothing at all by them?

PB: No [laughs]. But there are times when some idea just falls from the sky, and I don't exactly know what it means but I feel it. There are times when I've obeyed the purest of indulgences, where I don't even know where the fuck [something] came from, but in a way that will start to make sense to me. And those are even more precious, sometimes, than things I consciously construct. It's mostly consciously constructed, but at times I will obey that idea that falls from the sky. Pitchfork: In terms of Our Love lyrics, is there an actual "Heinrich Maneuver"?

PB: Yeah, but that's private information.

Pitchfork: [Laughs] Okay. What was the first thing you went out and bought when you found out that you had signed to Capitol?

PB: That I was in the cheese?

Pitchfork: Yeah.

PB: [Laughs] I think I bought some cheese.

Pitchfork: No, really?

PB: No, I don't know. It wasn't like Goodfellas, when the guy shows up with the fur coat and the white Christmas tree. Nothing changed. I eat a lot of sushi so maybe I just got some extra toro that day.

Pitchfork: In your press photos, you guys always seem to be really serious.

PB: Yeah, I noticed that too, actually.

Pitchfork: Is that intentional?

PB: Well, I fucking hate photos, but yeah, I noticed that. I saw a press photo and was like, "Geez, looking pretty glum." But that's the thing: if you were to have a contrived concept, I think you'd get so tired of trying to maintain it that you wouldn't be able to hold it up. So it's not that we go in there saying, "Guys, this is how we've got to look. This is our approach." Everybody just does what they feel at all times, and I think that we have a cohesive look because our personalities are similar in that way, or that's how we present ourselves. But it's not intentional to look serious. It's probably more representative of that fact that, "Fucking 'a', I don't want to be here right now."